The task of completing expense reports has been the bane of business travelers. While some transactions can be handled completely by computers (e.g., using a computerized transaction report such as a computer-readable credit card statement), there remain many situations where only a paper copy is available. The busy business traveler nonetheless must submit an expense report with such transactions. Legacy techniques to aid the business traveler have included the use of optical character recognition (OCR) to decipher expense items found on a receipt (e.g., using a computer-captured image of the receipt), however legacy OCR techniques often fail when attempting to recognize the merchant name and also fail to recognize expense items found on a receipt. Often a merchant will stylize their name, sometimes even omitting any character-level occurrences of the merchant's name in favor of providing branding images and/or merchant identification in the form of the merchant's logo. Some legacy approaches have attempted to correlate information found on the receipt in order to discern the merchant name, however such legacy techniques fail to find such correlations within an acceptable error rate. What is needed is a technique or techniques to identify the merchant so as to produce a computer-readable document that describes the transaction including the merchant name.